Sonic Adventure 2
I grew up playing Sonic Adventure 2 Battle, so with my recent playthrough of Sonic Adventure 1, I decided to play through Sonic Adventure 2 for the Dreamcast to get the full 2000's Sonic game experience, and boy was I not disappointed.
Little bit of a disclaimer... Sonic Adventure 2 on Dreamcast is worth an ungodly amount of money, and sometimes you have to do what you have to do when it comes to picking up these expensive ass games; For example, buying an **UNTESTED** **AS IS** copy of the game off an ebay seller with ZERO feedback for $30 dollars. That is what I did with Sonic Adventure 2.
While it did save me an extreme amount of money, I paid the ultimate price of the disc being scratched in such a strange way that sometimes during the cutscenes the characters won't speak. Nothing else is wrong with it, just sometimes there is no dialog, which honestly isn't an issue because the music is so fucking loud you wouldn't be able to hear them say anything anyways.
Okay anyways... Sonic Adventure 2 on Dreamcast is pretty much identical to the Gamecube version, minus a few MINOR changes, and with that being said it is MAYBE... POSSIBLY... My favorite Sonic game ever, and playing it on the Dreamcast just felt right. It would have been so COOL to play Shadow the Hedgehog, Sonic Heroes, SONIC MEGA COLLECTION.. OH my god. Jesus dude shut up and talk about the game maybe?? Yeah.. Fine.
Sonic Adventure 2 is dope from start to finish. That opening cutscene, "TALK ABOUT LOW BUDGET FLIGHTS... NO FOOD OR MOVIES?? IM OUTTA HERE!!", and the straight nosedive into City Escape is the best and most memorable opening to a video game ever. The gameplay is similar to Sonic Adventure 1 in which you play as 6 different characters, but this time they are split into two stories of good and evil.
Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles are the good guys of course, and Shadow, Eggman, and Rouge are the bad guys. Each character has their own type of gameplay: Sonic and Shadow do the usual running around fast and jumping around, Tails and Eggman control mechs and run around shooting enemies with lock on laser guns, and Knuckles and Rouge run around looking for emeralds.
Sonic and Shadow easily have the best levels. You run VERY FAST to the end of the level while fun and exciting music plays in the background.
Tails and Eggman's stages are pretty good as well, similar to Sonic and Shadow's stages but a tad bit slower, more platforming, and SHOOTING enemies.
Knuckles' stages are GREAT. The stages are small, easy to understand, and have SICK music. So even if you do end up spending 8 minutes looking for a hard to find emerald or something, its okay because you have those sweet knuckles raps playing in your ear.
ROUGE HOWEVER.... The only good thing I can say about her stages is that they have nice music. All of her stages, except for maybe the first stage, SUCK so bad and I think I took atleast 10 minutes on every single one of them, they are such a slog and piss me off.
But yeah, overall I'd say the gameplay is great and really is just an improvement over that of Sonic Adventure 1. The story in this game is FUN and CHEESEY and thats how Sonic games should be. For some reason all modern sonic games HAVE to take place on these weird lifeless planets where Sonic and Eggman are like the only two people left alive and I hate that. THIS GAME doesn't do that. They are straight up on EARTH, with HUMANS, and even the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES makes an appearance, and that is just perfect to me. Okay that was kind of like, an unecessary rant, but yeah the story is decent overall. I think Shadow's story is probably the most interesting part of it all, as the rest of the game is just the usual "Stop eggman!" type stuff.
MUSIC... The music is perfect. Every character has their own theme just like in Sonic Adventure 1 and they're all great, and these themes FOLLOW them into the stages. Sonic has the usual cheery rock music, and Shadow has this like.. I don't know what you'd call it, I want to say grunge but it totally isn't, you get the idea its like emo music and its SICK and all of his tracks are favorites of mine. AND OH MY GOD Live and Learn REMAINS to be the best song in the entire franchise, I literally listen to that shit so much it rocks. I don't even need to talk about the Knuckles rap songs, them shits are amazing, all of them. ROUGE also has some very good music, it like fun jazzy spy music and I really like it. Tails and Eggman's stages didn't really have anything too special in the way of music... Nothing too memorable in my opinion.
BUT YEAH... Banging soundtrack. Even if you HATE Sonic games, I am very sure that you can find some enjoyment in the soundtrack at the very least.
Sonic Adventure 2 on Dreamcast is GREAT, just as Sonic Adventure 2 Battle on Gamecube is. Honestly, after playing both I don't really see much of a difference between the two honestly, so if you want to experience this game don't feel to pressured by the choice of Gamecube or Dreamcast... Or PC... Or Emulator... Because they are all pretty much the same.
Great music, Great gameplay (overall), and a fun story, I think Sonic Adventure 2 EASILY gets a rating of FIVE space heaters, and TWO Reeses Peanut Butter Cups.
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